The Road Less Traveled By
by Hedwig and Pigwidgeon
Summary: AU- Goku managed to fight the heart virus off longer, Bulma and Vegeta's infamous "night" occurred a bit sooner, Piccolo was not immediately killed in the android's slaughter. Three small, seemingly inconsequential, changes-that result in a very different Mirai Timeline. It has always been said the road less traveled by makes all the difference...


Hi there peoples! Welcome, and thank you for opening this story I hope you enjoy it and it lives up to whatever expectations that you might have, but before we start this grand adventure to feel that there are a few things that I need to clear up first, so onto it….

To start off, Trunks and Bra are twins here.

Goten does exist in the Mirai timeline because Chi-Chi was three months pregnant with him when Goku died of the heart virus, and he was born right before the Androids came six months later (that's the actual timeline of what happened). Trunks (and Bra) are still a year older (they were six months old when future Goku died) then him though.

Also, as Trunks has a twin, so does Goten, and please don't run away screaming from this just because of the OC's, I wrote this with the intention of exploring what it would be like if there was more than one member of the future Z-warriors (Mirai Trunks), and what would happen in the Mirai timeline if the Dragon Balls were still in existence. I don't intend on writing any Mary-Sue's, I try my best to make my characters real with believable flaws. Goten's sister won't be all-powerful capable of destroying final version Cell in one hit and able to do no wrong and solving every conceivable problem that arises in the past while simultaneously pursuing a successful acting/singing/dancing career and authoring a best-selling cookbook, on top of being the reincarnation of Aphrodite/Cleopatra/Angelina Jolie because her beauty is so great and sacred. I promise she'll bear both the physical and mental scars that I think are appropriate when one is growing up in the Armageddon society created by the Mirai 17 & 18.

So, if you actually bothered to read this, then I'm sure that I've kept you occupied long enough...read and enjoy the story, and also review!

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Prologue

Piccolo had never been an idealist.

It was a simple fact, one that had always been a part of him, a part of his natural disposition ever since his first gulps of life giving air after he had burst through the thin, fragile, shell of his egg as he had hatched from The Demon Lord's final legacy. He had emerged, not with the bright eyed, innocent, naivety that others of youth possessed but with a cold, hard grip on the harsh realities of the world he had been brought into, and a single-minded purpose.

Avenge his father, and eradicate Son Goku.

He had failed at his father's final command of course, failed his task miserably, but the point remained that he had always looked at the world through a cynic's eyes, preferring to look upon a glass as half empty rather than full. Idealism had no place in his world; it was more of a little fantasy fairyland a hopeless romantic's unattainable fool's dream, then a mindset to him with people who attempted to gazer pat the atrocities committed by their fellow men and living in denial of abominable happenings occurring in the world trying to find a nonexistent optimistic side of the situation.

Fantasy had no place in reality.

Piccolo had always rather liked this aspect about himself, as he attributed this realist attitude to several of his better decisions in life.

It was this realist attitude that had been his motivating factor in training Gohan, and subsequently gaining his first true friend, knowing that they would need every capable, able bodied, fighter to assist in the crusade to beat back against the infringing Saiyan's. (Not that the kid had been much help, all he had done was moan and whine, and eventually managed to get him slaughtered, Piccolo thought, with far too much fondness then he would have enjoyed.)

It was this realist attitude that he had gone to Namek, knowing that the others would need all possible type of resistance against the, now long dead, Galactic Emperor Freeza, and had also led to the unintentional benefit of learning more about his heritage.

And, it was thanks to this realism attitude that Piccolo could accept his impending fate with seldom trouble.

He was going to die.

The Namekian had come to this conclusion long ago, as he laid sprawled in the dirt at the bottom of the man-crafted abyss the androids had forged to serve as his tomb, limbs splayed out around him at unnatural angles, with small, sharp, pebbles and bits and pieces of gravel digging into his back, and the gaping abdominal wound he had sustained from the catastrophic fight against the androids still oozing copious amounts of blood, the warm wet liquid pooling around his prone form.

He had attempted to move earlier, had tried in vain to shift into a more natural position so his final moments could at the very least be spent in some type of comfort, but the movement had only served to further irritate the additional contusions and lacerations that veiled his body, and the spasms of white-hot scorching pain that had consumed him only seconds later served to strongly discourage any further attempts.

Piccolo felt his eyes flutter as the walls of earth that surrounded him began to blur and dim, and the faintest edges of blackness began creeping into the outskirts of his vision. His antennae had gone slack against his forehead, and his breathing had become incredibly labored, more sporadic, his chest heaving in fast frantic bursts as the effort to draw air into his lungs and deliver the much needed subsistence to his bodily systems became more and more difficult with each passing, struggling, instant.

He didn't have much time left, this he knew for certain.

There was no point in allowing himself to indulge in any sort of idealistic motions of nonsense of Gohan retuning with aid in time, or Bulma in some way or another somehow managing to miraculously locate the battleground and come charging in, in some twisted cliché of a knight riding in on horseback to rescue her companions, bearing with her the vitality rejuvenating senzu beans.

No, he had neither the luxury nor the countenance required to permit himself a brief indulgence of such nonsensical delusions. They were inane, troublesome, things, completely contrariant to both his natural self, and the main priority (an aggravating, conundrum of a thing) that he had laid out.

How was he capable of providing assistance against these Androids Seventeen and Eighteen, from beyond the Kai's realm?

The answer, unsurprisingly, had not yet come to him in some sort of miraculous epiphany (not that he had thought it would), and Piccolo could feel a quiet, _feral_, sort of desperation welling up inside him. Time was warring against him, rapidly fading as it was and…..

His train of thought was derailed rather abruptly as a sudden coughing fit convulsed through his body; and it caused his lungs to burn as if a thousand hot, prickling, needles had been pressed into them.

But, certainly there had to be something he could do; there _**had**_ to be some sort of meager assistance he could offer in the battle against these two most recently emerged foes that were, doubtlessly, the greatest peril to the Earth's ultimate safety that it had faced yet.

The fact that the duo had managed to massacre (he could not bring himself to refer to the slaughter that had taken place as mere _killing_) the most powerful beings on the planet without so much as breaking a sweat served as an ominous omen.

The fact that they had _laughed _while doing so_, cackling _in a kind of perverse, sadistic glee; at the blood-curling shrieks of agony from the Z-Warriors as they callously, _**relentlessly**_, battered them to oblivion; at the dying howls of the warriors that seemed as if they tore through the very air they had been so potent, reverberating throughout the android's ears; echoing against the canyon walls of their surroundings. While all the while flickers of a delirious madness had danced across their otherwise stoic irises, served to be a significantly worse one.

His fingers coiled, imbedding themselves into the soft dirt of the Earth, at the thought of abandoning the inhabitants of the planet that had somehow become his home; forsaking them to the mercy of those monstrosities-and mercy was clearly a notion that neither of them had any degree of familiarity with.

But the question still remained _**what could he do**_?

What assistance could _**he**_ possibly give, when he would already be long since departed to the realm of the otherworld? When…..when….

His train of thought was once again lost to him as Piccolo felt his eye's fluttering shut yet again. He could feel his strength waning, abandoning him at a distressing pace as it seemingly lurched off of him in wave upon palpable wave.

_He thought that he had more time._

But more time, wasn't that what everybody seemed to need.

More time to say their goodbyes.

More time to try to cobble provisions together in order to insure that those left behind were properly taken care of.

More time to simply _live_.

More time…

More time…

**More **_time__**….**_

But Piccolo knew that he was to receive no more.

It was as the vigor of life steadily began to desert him as well, that the ghosts of images that would perish with him to the grave flashed across his mind's eyes,

_The Dragon Balls….._

_Kami himself…_

Utterly gone, faded from the plane of existence with no evidence to the contrary that their mere existence had been more than fables and legends to begin with…..

And there was absolutely nothing that Piccolo could do to prevent it….

…..

…..

…..

Or….or was there?

An abrupt thought swiftly penetrated it's way past the hazy fog that had begun to overtake his mind as his imminent demise grew closer; it was a daft, demented, thing….but it might just be insane enough to work.

For Piccolo recalled a time, more than a decade past now, when a situation parallel to this had occurred. The feared Demon King Piccolo, on the very brink of his own annihilation at the hands of a young Son Goku, prepared to take both Kami and the Dragon Balls to his grave as well; and even though Piccolo was well aware that his late father had scarcely cared about those particular thoughts one fact still remained.

The Demon King had spat out one last egg, the only one to preserve his own essence; the egg that had created _him _and it had been that last egg, it had been_ his _existence that made it possible to continue the legend.

Who was to say, that he wasn't capable of following that example?

Suddenly, Piccolo could see something that had been sorely missing mere minute's earlier, _**hope**_; and with that hope, an abrupt, savage, will churned within him.

Clinging to the scattered shreds of force that he could still left within himself, with a frenzied hysteria, Piccolo delicately managed to maneuver his body into an upright position, bracing the brunt of his weight onto his elbows. He disregarded the flaring pain that such an act caused, lessened now then earlier perhaps because of a sudden stream of adrenaline…or perhaps his body was starting to shut down.

It wasn't as if it mattered either way though…because…..because…..

Because, subsequently, after the span of what was barely sixty seconds had elapsed, Piccolo proceeded to pitch back onto the coarse soil of the Earth, and even as he recognized that what little breath that still left him proved to be even more labored then previously, even as the edge of darkness that had been lurking on the outskirts of his vision began to expand outwards consuming his eye's, he could feel nothing sans triumphant.

The android's might well be on their way to propelling the world into a state of barren desolateness, overruled by savage anarchy, yes.

But the Dragon Balls would remain, his actions had seen to that.

And as long as the Dragon Ball's yet remained, there could still be the barest sense of hope.

It was with this final thought, one that gave him a feeling of slight peace (perhaps even security) that Piccolo allowed his eyelids-that had grown exceptionally _**heavy**_-to drop….

And Piccolo breathed his last breath.

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A/N Author's Note!

And that's it for now, keep in mind this is only the prologue. Sorry for not going into details about the whole, spat out an egg thing, but I tried literally tried a dozen times to make a scene like that work, and I just couldn't, and I'd rather have a transition seem a bit abrupt then to include a scene that I personally feels brings down the piece as a whole.

Also, for anybody reading this, I'm in the process of creating two polls in my profile, to decide on the final names of Goten's sister, and Piccolo's son (both of whom we will meet in Chapter One-well, we'll meet the later at least, I might not be able to comfortably fit the newborn Son twins into the story until Chapter Two, but, hey, we'll see what happens.

REVIEW! I want honest opinions on my writing abilities!

I mean do I….

A) Completely suck and should never go near a computer again

B) Meh, so-so

Or

C) It's good!

See I even made it easy with a multiple choice for you guys


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